h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Liberalism seems to me to be one of the most... abused words in political language and I'd like to attempt a clarification of terms to check we're on the same page, as it were. Sometimes it feels like most debates in politics are really about definitions anyway.

It's complicated by the fact that, as kea kea kea kea kea kea kea ke said, it depends where you are. That said, perhaps the key thing is to remember the etymological root: liberalism comes from liberty and means freedom. Politically, this usually refers to freedom from the state. (There's a big debate about whether positive freedoms, i.e. the freedom *to* do something, as opposed to the freedom *from* something, is a legit consideration, but I don't want to get into that right now.)

I think it becomes a lot easier to understand if you think about political positions on a grid with two axes rather than one linear spectrum (of left and right).

So we'd have a vertical axis of social issues (ranging from authoritarian/fascist to libertarian/anarchist) and a horizontal axis of economics (ranging from left/communism to right/neoliberalism). See The Political Compass for a visual: http://www.politicalcompass.org/analysis2

The British Conservative Party is economically very liberal and socially less liberal. The British Labour Party is socially very liberal, but economically not very (in theory at least).

Of course, in America, the word liberal tends to be used mostly in the social sense and thus the Democrats are seen as "liberals", even though the Republicans are much more liberal in their economic outlook.

Does that make any sense? What do you guys think?

As for the initial quote, is there any context?

Ah, so I see from the thread about the Compass that some people aren't fans of the way it divides things up. Fair enough, but I think the general gist is reasonable, as related to liberalism anyway.

There's been a few threads about the compass, I think. I started one of them. It's a better tool than anything else I've seen, anyway.

TRiG.

Yeah. I'm just trying to get across the distinction between the word as used in terms of social affairs and as used for economic matters.

Well I guess 'economic liberalism' is a bit of a silly term in some ways. I think it's deliberately chosen though - to stress the implied connection between free market capitalism and personal freedoms.

I think that it's not so much a connection as a stress or conflict between the two. If capital is ungoverned then it must become unstable since the rich get richer and ultimately eat up the freedoms of everyone else. Personal freedom doesn't mean so much when you're working more and more for less and less.

We're right now at the turning of such a cycle right now. The thatchereaganoid anarchy of the last thirty years has finally crashed and would have ended capitalism itself if the state hadn't stepped in to save it.

I don't believe capitalism has recently been in any danger of dying a horrible death.

>>"I am saying that they would have kept going either making changes until they got the answer they wanted..."

But what's *wrong* with changing things to satisfy people who don't like the original idea?

I think Turnsup is right to a degree. But I wouldn't say we're coming to the end of a cycle exactly. I'd see it as a swinging pendulum. After a period of neoliberal (Thatcherite/Reaganite) deregulation (continued to some extent by New Labour), the pendulum is starting to swing the other way. Also look at the strong government role in the bailout. Not very (neo)liberal. (One of the reasons the Americans are worrying about creeping socialism!)

Except ironically, in Europe, the more left-wing parties aren't doing very well at all and in Britain we can expect to see a Conservative government. Funny how things turn out.

And Mr X is right, IMHO - some of the coverage in the media a few months ago was strongly implying the decline of capitalism itself, which was more than a bit sensationalist. It was a crisis in capitalism, not a crisis of capitalism.

Sorry to rattle on - special subject of mine!

In Canada we have a Prime Minister who started at the extreme right but becomes more popular as he abandons his 'principles' and discovers that Keynes may have been right after all.

He heads a minority government though so it will be interesting to find out if he regains said principles when, as looks likely, he gets a majority in the next election.

"So we'd have a vertical axis of social issues (ranging from authoritarian/fascist to libertarian/anarchist) and a horizontal axis of economics (ranging from left/communism to right/neoliberalism). See The Political Compass for a visual: http://www.politicalcompass.org/analysis2" Jeeze, I wish someone would tread on that blimmin' "political compass" and break it; I actually saw people citing it on W*kipedia apparently believing its some kind of serious, scholarly way of rating politics (and people wonder why wikipedia isn't taken seriously by academics) Politics doesn't break down into two simple graphs and "left" and "right" are not about economics, they're a simplification of two political traditions going back to the 18th century.

"I think Turnsup is right to a degree. But I wouldn't say we're coming to the end of a cycle exactly. I'd see it as a swinging pendulum. After a period of neoliberal (Thatcherite/Reaganite) deregulation (continued to some extent by New Labour), the pendulum is starting to swing the other way. Also look at the strong government role in the bailout. Not very (neo)liberal. (One of the reasons the Americans are worrying about creeping socialism!)"

It's quite an old cycle. Economic liberalism as a means of growth and prosperity goes back to the theories of Adam Smith (a left-leaning liberal, which is ironic in today's climate) which lead to laissez-faire in the 19th century (particularly in Europe) which produced prosperity for the few but poverty and misery for the working class. The injustices of this system and the collapse of laissez-faire following the 1929 crash lead to everyone effectively becoming different shades of Keynesian until a Chilean dictator decided to try laissez-faire in the '70s and inspired a British Prime Minister who inspired an American President and, after nearly 30 years of this experiment, successive deregulation of the financial sector caused a global crash which has lead to a new wave of nationalisation and a backing-off from deregulation. In 30 years we'll doubtless see the pendulum swing the other way again.

>Also look at the strong government role in the bailout. Not very (neo)liberal.

The really ugly truth for the neoliberal ideologues was a strong government with a huge treasury saved their precious financial sector from its own nonsense. In Iceland which had large, powerful banks and a relatively small government and treasury the banks simply collapsed and took the Icelandic economy with them. The lesson was straightfoward: if a commercial, private sector becomes too big to fail then if it does fail (which the laws of averages says it will eventually) then it creates chaos. The solution is to regulate and control the banking sector properly, not give it free reign and bank on a theory (ie that the self-interest of the banking sector would iron-out any flaws - it didn't) to protect the livelihood and security of the rest of the world. This is a lesson that should have been learned in 1929 but by 1979 most people who were involved in or remembered that crash were dead or retired.

>Well I guess 'economic liberalism' is a bit of a silly term in some ways. I think it's deliberately chosen though - to stress the implied connection between free market capitalism and personal freedoms.

There's no "implied connection", economic freedom is a freedom the same as personal freedom. What has happened isn't because economic freedom is bad (it's not) but because it was taken too far. The personal freedom equivalent would be to cancel any and all police presence in the nation's cities because they are "unncessary" as "reasonable people get along just fine and can work out any problems between them". We all know the result would be a less civil, not more civil society because whilst most people are reasonable those who aren't would take advantage of the lax new regime. What happened in the financial sector is kind-of similar.

This is true and explains why the problems with both are the same. It's impossible for everyone to be free in the sense of unrestrained. Obviously, your freedom will be lost to my overenthusiastic freedom.

Economic freedom is the same. Economists have for some time claimed that the economy can grow endlessly so that I can get richer and richer and it doesn't affect you.

This just goes to prove that money is the most powerful hallucinogen ever invented.

Zagreb , your post 34 , carries a good analogy , I like it .